▲ The Ring Nebula, which looks like a woman’s mascara captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Source: NASA However, a view with the Hubble Space Telescope reveals a beautiful ring and a small white dwarf star shining in the middle of space that looks like a central cobalt lake.
The original Ring Nebula is called a planetary nebula because a star the size of our Sun evolves to become a red giant at the end of its life, and eventually ejects its outer shell into space.
But it has nothing to do with planets. In the old days when there were no telescopes, it looked like a planetary disk, so it was named that way.
A view of the Ring Nebula (M 57) as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Source: NASA The Ring Nebula is also a future image of our Sun. It’s almost certain that our sun will probably look like that in about 6 billion years. The central white dwarf is a very hot and dense star, about one-hundredth the size of the original star, the size of our Earth. It usually contains about half the mass of the Sun compressed into a volume about the size of the Earth.
The featured image, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared camera, shows a strikingly different appearance from the Hubble image.
Although the central ring spans about 1 light-year (our solar system is about 1 light-day) across, deep exposure in the James Webb Telescope’s infrared field of view reveals a series of filaments of gas, like cosmic eyelashes, clearly visible around the rings.
These long filaments, which look like a woman’s mascara, are likely caused by the powerful light emitted from within, resulting in the shadows of dense gas knots in the rings. The Ring Nebula (M 57) lies about 2500 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.
Lee Kwang-sik, science columnist [email protected]
